Giving presentations is a common and often important aspect of many professions and business ventures. As with any form of communication, the most effective presentations to an audience will sustain the audience's attention, enable easy viewing of the presenter's materials, and facilitate audience focus on the presentation. In some cases, the presenter may be making a presentation in a third party location, such as a client's conference room, a meeting facility or other location potentially unfamiliar to the presenter.
Various forms of computing technology are often utilized in making presentations. When the audience is smaller, a presenter may use a single portable device such as a tablet or laptop computer to display a presentation. However, this form of presentation requires the audience to crowd around the device display, perhaps in uncomfortable or awkward positions. The small presentation space also may result in awkward interactions and constrained movements when referencing points on the display.
In another example, fixed or portable projectors may display a presentation on a wall or separate screen. However, the room in which a projector is utilized should have certain features and configurations for projected presentations to be effective. For example, the room should have a wall suitable for displaying the projected images, as well as appropriate seating for easy viewing of the presentation. If a suitable wall is not available, a separate screen must be provided by the presenter or facility personnel, and the screen must be carefully located for easy viewing by the audience. In practice, many conference rooms and other locations are unsuitable for projection presentations. Additionally, privacy concerns may also make projected presentations undesirable.
Further, the presenter often must allow extra time before beginning the presentation for setting up and configuring the projector. The presenter may also be relying on the meeting host or other party to set up and configure the projector, which may or may not occur. Further, and particularly when a presenter is using a projector provided by the meeting host or other party, equipment connectivity issues, projector component failure and other technical issues may occur and negatively impact the presentation.
Where each audience member has a computing device that is connected to the Internet or other existing network, an online application such as a web conference application or peer-to-peer application may be used to provide the presentation. However, presentations delivered via the Internet or other existing network connections may be subject to distracting latency issues where connection speed is limited or fluctuates. Among other examples, such issues may degrade the quality of a streamed video, making video portions of a presentation unacceptably poor. Presentations may also be interrupted entirely should the network connection fail. Further, existing solutions for directly streaming video provide limited control and monitoring of a recipient's viewing of the video.
In some situations, audience members' computing devices may operate on different platforms and/or utilize differing networking configurations and corresponding networking hardware. Such differing software and hardware can present connectivity challenges and associated latency issues related to changing connection speeds.
Additionally, and especially where a presentation contains sensitive or confidential information, security concerns with such data traveling over the Internet or other third party networks may also be significant. Further, if the location of the presentation does not provide access to a required external network, or the presenter is unable to connect to a local network, such online applications may not be used.